How to Launch a Teen: From the Doubt-Pushing Enabler

A few more days of information gathering on your part, and then we'll recap.

In the meantime, I've looked some more at Brad Sach's book. In the first chapter he establishes five categories (his word) of young adults: Progressing, Regrouping, Meandering, Recovering, and Floundering. He described the young adults in each of these categories with broad strokes, and rarely refers to them again in the remainder of the book. In Chapter 1, he identifies a number of developmental tasks for young adults:

• grieve because their childhood is over
• negotiate interdependent relationships with their support group
• establish an identity that is separate from their parents
• develop a personal philosophy
• overcome fears about leaving home
• create conflict with their parents
• engage in an internal dialogue about who they are
• learn to accept advice and assistance
• evaluate their self-management tools and learn new ones
• accept success and failure
• understand the relationship between freedom and responsibility
• learn to balance competing responsibilities
• further regulate emotions and behaviors
• expand their personal story to include being an independent, functional adult

I have a few problems with this book. First, the author doesn't offer any research supporting his ideas about launching children. No references at all. Everyone interested in the science of psychology will recognize my problem. Second, he abandons both the categories he establishes for describing the processes of young adults as they launch and the developmental tasks immediately after their introduction. Rather than using these as a structure for the remainder of the book, he meanders through a series of clinical anecdotes in which parents are consistently identified as disconnected, inflexible, overbearing, doubt-pushing enablers. Finally, I think the book would have benefitted from more structured questions and exercises related to the developmental tasks that were identified.